[media-credit name=”Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post” align=”alignright” width=”270″][/media-credit] Douglas Bruce drinks a Slurpee outside a Denver courtroom before his sentencing hearing on tax evasion charges in February of 2012.

Sen. Kent Lambert might get some support for a rewrite of Senate Bill 122, a bill that he hopes will deal only with the costs of discovery for criminal defendants.

But the Colorado Springs Republican has already junked the rest of the bill, which would have softened penalties for tax evasion and made the court process more favorable for such criminal defendants.

What was the impetus for a bill to help out accused tax evaders? The senator admitted that some of the proposed changes were suggested by Douglas Bruce, the former Republican lawmaker from Colorado Springs and anti-tax activist who was sentenced to 180 days in jail after being convicted on four counts in a tax evasion case.

Prosecutors said Bruce used a non-profit, from which he ran a campaign for three tax-slashing initiatives that failed at the polls, to shield millions of dollars in income from state taxes.

Senate Democrats and their Republican colleagues are poised to drop their own budget bill Monday after a week of fruitless negotiations with House Speaker Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch.

“I think the Senate Republicans are just as frustrated with Frank McNulty as the Senate Democrats,” said Senate President Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont. “This is more of a Senate vs. House thing than it is a Democrat vs. Republican thing.”

McNulty essentially shrugged off the development, saying the negotiations would still continue even if a budget bill is introduced with no deal in place.

“If the Senate Democrats want to introduce their own bill, we’ll have the debate,” McNulty said. “House Republicans will have our opportunity to put our stamp on the budget.”

But what about the fact that Senate Republicans agreed to the budget as well?

“They’re at a five-seat minority in the Senate, so I wouldn’t expect that they would be able to get as fair a deal as our House Republicans might,” McNulty said. “So, I don’t view it as the Senate Repubicans going off the reservation.”

Continuing a tug-of war over a cash surplus in Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s office, the Democratic-controlled Senate today voted to sweep the money while ripping the Republican over his plan to moonlight.

“We’ve got a Secretary of State that can’t figure out how to run the office as efficiently as the previous secretary,” said Senate Majority Leader John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, who offered the amendment to strip the funding from Gessler’s office.

“He (Gessler) needs to do more with less. This is the same secretary of state that didn’t think he could do the job on the $68,500 salary provided.”

In a statement, Gessler said Morse’s amendment was fiscally irresponsible.

“I have said time and again that the funding for our office comes from fees on businesses and those fees need to be spent in providing services to the business community,” Gessler said. “Taking these business filing fees to fill other budget gaps simply continues our state’s irresponsible budgeting. By attempting to raid these business fees, Colorado’s job creators will be on the hook for even more.”

The shootout over Gessler’s cash fund came during a long debate today over a series of supplemental appropriation bills that would balance the current 2010-11 fiscal year budget before it ends in June.

Assistant Minority Leader Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, called the sweep of Gessler’s cash fund “theft” and said Morse was making unfair personal attacks on an elected official who’d only been in office a little over a month.

Sen. Keith King poses during the first regular session of the 68th Colorado General Assembly. (Joe Amon, Denver Post file)

A Republican state senator who’s also a school principal restored funding today for a program that subsidizes school breakfasts for poor children.

Sen. Keith King, R-Colorado Springs, moved an amendment in the Senate Appropriations Committee this morning that approved $124,229 in supplemental funding for the Start Smart Nutrition Program, which makes breakfast free for children who would otherwise have to pay a reduced price of 30 cents.

“I just don’t think this is an appropriate place to be cutting K-12 education,” King said. “We had the money. We have some kids that needed that program.”

The funding was needed to help cover the costs of the program through the end of the current 2010-11 fiscal year, which ends in June.

Just when it seemed that Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler had won the battle over keeping a $3.5 million surplus in his office, the Democratic-controlled state Senate says not so fast.

Senate President Brandon Shaffer said today the Senate this week would circle back to the matter of the cash fund in Gessler’s office and whether lawmakers will sweep it.

“I think we’ll have a healthy conversation around Scott Gessler’s plans to keep the extra funds in his office,” Shaffer said.

The legislature’s Joint Budget Committee last week at first voted – in a compromise offered by Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs – to take $2 million from Gessler’s cash fund, money he’d wanted to hold onto instead of reverting it to help balance the state budget as his Democratic predecessor Bernie Buescher had proposed.

But Lambert later reversed his earlier action and took out the sweep of Gessler’s money from a JBC cash fund transfer bill. It appeared Gessler would be able to keep all the money in his office.

In another reversal of fortune, Secretary of State Scott Gessler will get to keep the $2 million from his cash fund that the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee had voted to sweep earlier in the week.

But when Gessler took office, he reversed that policy and said he was going to spend the money in his department. He argued that the money was generated by business fees and should go for the benefit of businesses.

On Wednesday, though, the Joint Budget Committee voted to sweep $2 million from the fund after Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, modified the original motion, which was to sweep the whole surplus.

The legislature’s Joint Budget Committee voted this afternoon to take $2 million from a cash fund in Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s office, money he had wanted to keep and spend in his own agency.

On a 6-0 vote, the JBC decided to sweep $2 million from the fund. Former Secretary of State Bernie Buescher, a Democrat, last year had offered up $3.5 million in surplus money from the cash fund to help balance the state budget, and former Gov. Bill Ritter’s administration had built that money into its proposed 2011-12 budget. The state is facing at least a $1.1 billion shortfall.

But when Gessler, a Republican who defeated Buescher in November, took office, he reversed the transfer of the $3.5 million, saying he wanted to keep at least part of it to help fight business identity theft. He pointed out that the Secretary of State’s office receives no money from the state’s general fund and is funded almost entirely by fees imposed on businesses.

[Update:In an interview with a Colorado Springs TV station, Lambert appears to suggest he and fellow Republicans voted against funding for the Start Smart program because former Gov. Bill Ritter’s office had already rejected the idea late last year. However, there was no discussion of this fact during the Joint Budget Committee’s Jan. 18 meeting nor is it clear that JBC members or staff were even aware of this fact at the time.]

Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, tweeted on Tuesday: “We may eventually change our vote because its technical and the Gov’s Office admitted guilt.”

The JBC last week voted on a 3-3 party-line vote not to provide additional funding for the Start Smart Nutrition Program in the current year. The program subsidizes the cost of reduced-price breakfasts for poor children, so kids who normally would have to pay 30 cents for breakfast get it for free.

Without the additional $124,229, funding for the state subsidy will run out in March and kids eligible for reduced-price breakfasts will have to start paying the 30 cents instead of getting it for free for the rest of the school year.

After the vote, Lambert said, “”As a family guy myself with children and grandchildren, I take a very strong responsibility to earn money to feed my own family.” He suggested churches and charities could step up to provide for hungry families.

His comments angered many people, though he also had a number of defenders.

Students inside the cafeteria at Dora Moore k-8 School in Denver eat lunch as Colorado House Democrats host a press conference outside saying they would restore funding for the free breakfast program that feeds thousands of low-income children across Colorado. (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)

Sen. Kent Lambert, one of the Republicans on the Joint Budget Committee who voted against supplemental funding for a school breakfast subsidy for poor children, has had concerns about such programs in the past.

In 2009, Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, submitted questions to the Colorado Department of Education about its overall approach on nutrition.

“Is the Department looking at reducing childhood obesity, especially among the poor? What are they doing to decrease it?” Lambert asked.

There have been a few party-line votes on the legislature’s now evenly split Joint Budget Committee, but one 3-3 decision on Tuesday reverberated through the blogosphere with talk of hungry kids and hard-hearted lawmakers.

The issue at hand was a supplemental funding request for the Start Smart Nutrition Program, which subsidizes the cost of breakfast at school for poor children. The Colorado Department of Education, which administers the program, said the number of school districts using the program and the number of kids who qualify for it has grown.

The department requested $124,229 more in funding to cover an estimated total cost of $768,210 for the program in the current budget year, which ends in June.

Because lawmakers had appropriated more for the program in prior years than was necessary, there remains a $253,547 untapped balance in a cash fund set up for the program.

But Republicans on the JBC voted against the request, and on a 3-3 vote, the measure failed.

Joey Bunch has been a reporter for 28 years, including the last 12 at The Denver Post. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry.